January 20, 1961: Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife, Rose, are all smiles at their son's inauguration.

January 20, 1961: A triumphant president and first lady enter the armory in Washington for one of five inaugural balls that were held that night.

January 20, 1961: President Kennedy surveys the crowd at the armory ball.

Few men helped shape Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s early public image as much as the German-born photographer Jacques Lowe, who was granted extraordinary access to the Kennedy circle during the years leading up to J.F.K.’s ascension to the White House, and for a little while thereafter. Five months after Lowe’s death, in 2001, all of his Kennedy negatives were destroyed in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, where they were stored in a vault. His family and his publishers worked to restore many of the images from extant prints and contact sheets; in 2003, a selection of Lowe’s Kennedy photographs was published in the book Remembering Jack. Here are 13 images that show the personal side of a mythic family’s rise to the pinnacle of American power.